Responsibilities of a sales manager

Sales are vital to the success of your business and without the right sales manager you won't be able to drive in the sales you need to stay alive. An effective sales manager will be able to hire other sales personnel that can bring in the sales your company needs to stay alive and to function at it's highest level. The sales members are the last individual and often the only individual to interact with a customer. They have to be ready at all times to answer a handful of questions from customers that may not always be the easiest questions. They also need to be able to find people to bring into the company from customer referrals and other situations. To hire the right sales manager you need to go out and define what their role is with your company. Here are some of the key responsibilities of a sales manager.

Establish Goals
The sales manager and the marketing manager will work closely together to establish sales goals for the company. They need to have a strategy to setting these goals and a method as to how they will be able to achieve them. The sales manager needs to have a particular idea in mind as to some different strategies they want to follow that will drive in the sales. Initially the sales manager will be expected to follow the existing goals while they work their way up with the company and learn about it and how it works. Once they have their feet wet, you can then turn it over to them to start establishing the goals based on your fiscal year.

Sales Strategies
Similar to the planning and setting of the goals, the sales manager will be in charge of coming up with the sales strategies you will follow in order reach the goals. The sales manager is ultimately in charge of a handful of other sales members and they are going to be responsible for the entire team if they do not meet their quotas. This is why the sales manager has to have creative and effective sales strategies if they are going to be successful with the company.

Management
A big part of being a sales manager comes down to how well you are able to manage your employees and to help them with their job responsibilities. Not every sales manager has what it takes to manage other people as they don't know how to follow up with them and they struggle to communicate effectively with their employees and they don't help them to move forward and to become better at their jobs. As they oversee the sales team, they also need to come with a backup plan for a marketing strategy that doesn't excel. Having a backup plan allows your staff to see that you are competent and that you aren't going to accept any type of failure.

One other key role they have as a manager is the ability to hire people to work under them and to also let go of the people that are not excelling. You must look for the person that commands respect by their employees but also has the ability to discern the good employees from the bad ones.

Controlling Inventory Problems
While inventory often lies in the hands of the marketing manager, sales managers commonly deal with the inventory problems. You must be able to hire a good sales manager that can read into the inventory and can fix problems pertaining to inventory that isn't moving off the shelves. Holding just enough inventory on stock to fulfill orders is the best method as you don't want to carry excessive amounts of inventory that lead to depreciation of the product and its value.